Note 31 — ORIENTAL WIT AND HUMOUR.

A variant of this occurs in the Heptameron, an uncompleted work in imitation of the Decameron, ascribed to Marguerite, queen of Navarre (16th century), but her valet de chambre Bonaventure des Periers is supposed to have had a hand in its composition. In Novel 55 it is related that a merchant in Saragossa on his death-bed desired his wife to sell a fine Spanish horse for as much as it would fetch and give the money to the mendicant friars. After his death his widow did not approve of such a legacy, but, in order to obey her late husband’s will, she instructed a servant to go to the market and offer the horse for a ducat and her cat for ninety-nine ducats, both, however, to be sold together. A gentleman purchased the horse and the cat, well knowing that the former was fully worth a hundred ducats, and the widow handed over one ducat—for which the horse was nominally sold—to the mendicant friars. Return